Choosing Hardware For Your Plex Server

Thinking about building your own Plex Server? In this episode we take a look at what hardware you need to consider before building your server so that your Plex streaming experience is as smooth as possible!

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[Tinker]

I realize I’m 2 years late but this just popped up.

I have a mini PC I got for $130 on AliExpress(N100 celeron) that has done 5 4k transcodes at once over remote connections. Hooked up a DAS and that’s that. Pulls an average of 15watts, runs 24/7/365. Auto starts after lost power.

Things don’t have to be overly complicated or expensive.

[thesparkybunch]

I did heaps of research for my Plex server/HTPC and found the best case option to be Coolermasters 130 mini ITX case. Looks the part next to all the other home theater equipment, only a single blue power light on the front, great front to back airflow so the sides aren't too important, and has an optical drive slot. I went the shiny black pioneer blue ray drive which looks perfect for a HTPC.

[plexmex]

Thank you for informing the folks out there with new Plex Content. It is an important work for the community of Plex.

My Setup is specifically build for getting the most out of Plex with Hardware transcoding with the lowest power consumption. This Rig is locatetd in a Data Center. I use my RAM as a RAM-Disk, so I don't kill my SSD's through all the transcodings with needless writes.


The maximum simultaneous streams in the past was 32.
I haven’t ever seen more streams on my Plex Server. However, I must confess that I called all my users at the time to stream simultaneously. So I could test my server to see, if my server can handle so many streams. And yes it does ;-) . But in general it is 1-3 at the same time. But between christmas and new year, this number usually increases dramatically up to 23-25 simultaneous streams. And sometimes even higher.

I have converted all my movies (mostly 1080p) to MKV, h264 and AAC, so that the CPU has as little to deal with it as possible and I so can still optimize the power consumption a bit.
In my eyes, it makes no sense at all to transcode a 4K file into a lower resolution. Either you are able to play 4K natively or you don't.
With my nearly 32TB I run into a big storage problem. Therefore, I’ll increase my storage pool from 48TB up to 600TB raw storage with a Storinator Q30.
And don't forget buy a UPS to avoid Data corruption to your NAS during sudden Power outages.

PC:
CPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5-2630L v4 @1.80 GHz
CPU-Cooler: 2x Silverstone Heligon HEO2 (passiv cooled)
RAM: 512 GB ECC (256GB is for RAM-Disk)
Mainborad: ASUS Z10PE-8D WS
SSD: 2x Samsung 860 Pro 2TB
GPU: PNY Quadro P5000 – 16GB (Nvidia)
Fan: 3x Noctua NF-A14 PPC 2000 PWM (140 mm)
Networkcard: Mellanox ConnectX-5 EN with 2 SFP+ Ports
Case: Fractal Define R6 USB-C – Black

Power-consumption:
Consumption @ Idle: 120W
Consumption @ Normal: 130-170W
Consumption @ Full load: 230W (Stresstest CPU & GPU)

Internet Connection:
Symmetrical 10 Gbits connection on fiber


NAS:
Model: QNAP TS-453B
HDD: 4x Seagate IronWolf 12tb @ 3.5" => 32TB usable Storage
RAID: 5

UPS: (During the time I had my Plex-Server at home)
- APC Smart-UPS X 1500 VA, Rack/Tower LCD, with a Networkcard. (For my Router, Firewall and Switches) holds them up over 2, 5 hours.
- APC Smart-UPS X 3000 VA, Rack/Tower LCD, with a Networkcard. For my Plex-Server and the NAS) holds them up over 6 hours, with the external Batterypack.
- APC Smart-UPS X, 120V external Batterypack Rack/Tower.


My opinion:
A solid choice for a GPU that would only be used for transcoding, like in my case is a:
1. P2000 - 5 GB
2. P5000 - 16 GB
3. GV100 - 32 GB (Definitely Overkill, but if you need way more than 50+ streams at the same time... I would go for it.)


This videos helped me a lot to build my Plex Server in the past.
A good source of information for hardware transcoding can be found here:

Plex GPU Overkill can be found here:

Plex with RAM-Disk:

To all out there I wish good luck in building your Plex server and have fun with it.

[juswiffin]

Some folks ramble chaotically and make it hard to follow what they're trying to explain.. I like when people take their time explaining everything so, cheers for that!

[grimfeather]

If you have the hard drive space in the case, but not the motherboard connectors as is my situation... add in a raid card. It will give you way more options storage wise as well as run your storage in at least raid 5 to give you a bit of leeway if you had a hard drive failure. That way you wouldnt have to redownload all of your media all over again. 8-10TB platter drives are becoming very affordable these days. Get three of them in raid 5 and you will go to go for a long while.

[darkphotographer]

realisticly for most people will be 1-3 trascod at the time , you may give access to 20 people most will not open the app more than 2 times

[sabonim]

I'm runnning an old 4th gen intel on unraid. it has a lot of sata ports (10, if I remember correct). I plan to upgrade soon for at 12th with integrated gpu. I have an old GPU for transcoding, but hardly use it, so it's going to go out the window soon, I believe.

[AztecGuyGDL]

Might be late but I suggest you get a mini pcie to SATA card to add more SATA ports to your server.

[bubbaj]

Wait. So my graphics card doesn’t matter at all since I have the newest intel cpu? I was wondering if the new Antill arc GPU would work better as a home theater PC instead of a 1650 super

[ChadDetwiler]

I run Plex with remote access, with a old old old hammy-down server. I can support 2 transcodes but ive had as many as 5 concurrent streams. All on a Intel Xeon 5130 @ 2x GHz. That Load Has it Pegged at 100% but typical traffic is 1-2 streams keeps still high, but ~85%. The hardware was free so 🤷‍♂

[davidcarroll]

I really always want the best to do the job, not the least . not sure why people want to go into figuring out what can you get by with.

[chrisbullock]

If you have your internet network/router in the same room as your main movie watching tv you don't really have any issues with needing transcoding. Now days GOOGLE Chromecast TV and other streaming divices that you can connect directly with ethernet cables allow you to get full Audio/Video without transcoding anything. Full Dolby Vision/HDR 10 and Atmos

[JassieClassy]

great video, would be worth it if you went over plex hdr movies, hdr transcoding and hdr tonemapping but otherwise great video!

[azrd]

You WANT a cpu with quicksync. Makes a huge difference

[overratedprogrammer]

My problem is people who use my server need to transcode due to shitty internet/network environments. So I want to make sure that I CAN handle transcode if need be.. this basically means that I can't have 4k content on my server though.. (when you play a movie with different versions does it ask you which one you want every time?)

[sheldondmanson]

So in order to benefit with 4k HDR no buffering then a Threadripper PRO 7995WX seems to be a logical but overkill choice

[brotha]

I'm good with my synology Ds720 2 bay nas with 2, 8tb hard drives 2 samsung nvme ssd cache cards with a max of upgraded 6gb of ram storage good enough for my plex server needs

[CupidFromKentucky]

Might want to tone down your background music. A lot.

[JassieClassy]

great video, would be worth it if you went overt plex hdr and hdr tonemapping. otherwise awesome.

[ericmjiron]

I5 8400 itx build thinking about adding a p400 quadro based on Nova sprit video but never hit a bottle neck limited to 4 1080p streams. Being a truck driver I do need 1 remote stream.